COVID-19 Email Marketing Guide

COVID-19 email marketing

Email is an effective way to re-engage old prospects and nurture leads throughout the leasing journey. As communities face longer leasing cycles during COVID-19, email marketing has become a critical form of communication to keep warm leads interested and informed. In the month of March, we sent over 100 prospect email campaigns on behalf of apartment communities nationwide. The email campaigns we sent averaged a 31% open rate, a 15% click rate, and a 30% increase in website conversion rates. In this guide, we shared the trends we saw across top-performing email campaigns and email strategies your team can use to drive similar results.

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Local Digital Ad Spend to Reach $38.5B by 2016

In a new report from research firm BIA/Kelsey, it projected that local online and mobile advertising will grow at an annual rate of 12.7%.

These numbers show substantial lift compared with the $21.2B spent in 2011, but still pale in comparison to traditional advertising spend.

Traditional Spend was $111.5B in 2011, but is only projected to grow to $112.7B. Those are essentially flat numbers, meaning not much will change from no until 2016. In fact, traditional ad spend will decrease to account for about 75% of overall ad budgets, dropping almost 10% from the 84% it’s at now.

This research shows that more and more small businesses are investing into digital advertising, but the real question is: are you?

If you haven’t evaluated your online strategy recently, you need to. Digital advertising is not going away, in fact, it’s only getting bigger.

Check out some of our offerings for digital marketing. We do all sorts of search and display advertising. We also do email marketing, mobile websites and more.


Email and Paid Search Garner High ROI Ratings

New data from digital marketing firm eConsultancy says Paid Search and Email Marketing are two of the best options for high-ROI campaigns.

The data comes from a survey of marketing professionals around the globe, where they rated their satisfaction with various marketing channels.

In the report, 70% rated email marketing as either excellent (23%) or good (47%). Also, 56% of the respondents stated that paid search campaigns offered ROI figures that were either excellent (14%) or good (44%).

This is great news for small businesses. Email and Search Targeting are easy to implement into a marketing plan and, as the data shows, offer great results.

Another place that made large strides was mobile. In this survey, 41% of marketers said mobile gave them excellent or good return on their investment. This is an increase of 23% compared with the data from 2008.

Maybe your business hasn’t implemented these marketing plans, or maybe you’ve tried and it hasn’t worked out very well. Regardless of your past situation, we guarantee we can help you with your local marketing plan.

Contact us today or leave a note in the comments to see how we can help your business.


3 Marketing Trends You Need to Implement

A lot of business missed the boat on a few marketing trends over the last few years. Some missed out on websites, some on email marketing and others on mobile. Your business may have missed out on some or all of these trends, but I’m here to make sure you don’t miss out on these next three!


1. Mobile

Mobile is huge these days. Mobile search has already been exploding and mobile shopping is expected to increase substantially in the next few years.

2. Data
You need data to understand exactly why you’re doing something, and how you can make it better. The old model of creating a radio or TV commercial is gone. Now we have the ability to track, alter and optimize every ad campaign.

3. Branding
Your brand doesn’t just exist on your website anymore. You are on social places such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, etc. Your brand is more “out there” than ever, and your customers have more avenues than ever to contact you — you just need to give them reason to.

It’s a unique time to be a small business. Never before have you had the power to reach so many customers as easily as you can today. The world of digital marketing offers countless ways to interact with your customers, and using as many of them as possible can help bring you new business and more brand exposure.

If you are curious about any of these methods such as SMS targeting, search marketing, retargeting, behavioral targeting, mobile targeting and more, contact us today. We’ll help you wade through the field of digital marketing and advertising.


3 Ways to Increase Sales on Valentine’s Day

So Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, which means millions of couples around the U.S. will be purchasing traditional Valentine’s Day things such as flowers, jewelry, candy, and clothes. So how can you use this to your advantage? The answer is with digital marketing and advertising.

Even if you don’t sell any of the traditional Valentine’s Day gifts, use this holiday as a chance to offer a special promotion, and perhaps even persuade your customers that a new car or hot tub is a better alternative to blowing money on an expensive dinner and diamond bracelet. Sending these kinds of updates through email gives you an easy way to tell all your customers that you’re offering a special.

Follow these three tips to make your Valentine’s email blast successful.

1. Target men

Segment your email list to your male customers. The reason you do this is simple: men spend more than twice as much as women on Valentine’s Day. That means you need to use language targeted to males. Stress the importance of coming up with a gift for their special someone, and highlight the idea of giving a unique gift, depending on what it is that you’re selling.

2. Timing is everything

Depending on how much your product costs, you might want to send the email out a couple of weeks in advance. If your product is a little cheaper, a few days before – or even on – Valentine’s Day will work because it will be fresh in their mind about buying a gift for their significant other.

3. Promote it via social channels

Social Media is a great way to promote your Valentine’s Day offer. Provided that you have a fair amount of followers, sending out timely updates leading up to Valentine’s Day can give your fans and followers a reason to check out your store.

There you have it. Follow these three tips, and you could capitalize on thousands of local Valentine’s Day shoppers. For more tips on local marketing and advertising, check out the rest of our blog or go to our website.


Small Businesses Moving Aggressively to Online Marketing

Digital marketing is continuing to grow compared to traditional forms of advertising among small and medium-sized companies (SMBs).

According to BIA/Kelsey, digital spending for US SMBs is expected to reach $16.6 billion annually by 2016.

That means 70 percent of SMB marketing budgets will be spent on digital. In 2010, SMBs spent 52 percent of their budgets on traditional marketing and advertising, but that number will shrink to 30 percent in 2015.

Digital marketing includes mobile, social, online directories, online display, retargeting, search, and more.

Neal Polachek, president of BIA/Kelsey, said SMBs are using digital practices to engage their customers for longer periods of time.

“With the advent of daily deals to drive customer acquisition, SMBs are now increasingly focused on leveraging technological solutions to engage, grow and retain a higher percentage of their customers,” said Polachek. “As this trend accelerates, these SMBs will turn to outside providers to harness simple tools, which will enable them to maximize the long-term value of each new customer they acquire.”

Marketing Spend by SMBs

Some of the other Key takeaways from the report are as follows:

  • Overall, U.S. SMB spending on media, marketing and business solutions will grow from $22.4 billion in 2010 to $40.2 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent.
  • SMB spending on traditional advertising will be essentially flat during the forecast period, experiencing a 0.6 percent CAGR, from $11.8 billion in 2010 to $12.1 billion in 2015.
  • SMB spending on digital/online media will grow from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $16.6 billion in 2015 (24.9 percent CAGR).
  • SMBs will also increase spending on performance-based commerce and transaction platforms, from $1.7 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion in 2015 (21.5 percent CAGR).
  • Spending by SMBs on customer retention business solutions will grow from $3.5 billion in 2010 to $6.9 billion in 2015 (14.6 percent CAGR).

As you can see, digital marketing and advertising are becoming increasingly important. There’s no excuse for why you shouldn’t have your own digital marketing campaign. Contact us today to learn more.


Infographic on the importance of SMS messaging

So we’ve already explained to you the importance of doing a Text Campaign for your business, but texting has a broader reach than use in mobile marketing. As the number one data service in the world, it is helping developing countries buy and sell things easier and safer.

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Some Stats about Texting

OMG! News flash! Texting is huge!

If I told you that you need to start an SMS campaign for your business, would you believe me? You might disagree. You might say “No, texting is just a fad,” or “No one uses texting to stay in contact with their customers.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re mistaken. Texting today is more important than email.

Texting is the most used data service in the world. Yup, that’s right. It’s used more than email, telephone calls and mail. There are more texts sent per year than there are people in the world. Texting is a huge communication medium, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Not sure what an SMS campaign is? Check out our post on SMS Basics

Since 2009, voice minute usage on cell phones decreased 12 percent, but texting rose 40 percent. Texting is the way your customers interact with each other, so shouldn’t you interact with them in a way that they’re familiar with?

Phone use by gender

A this point you might be thinking “Sure, young people text, but they have no money. I want to market to customers over 35.” Well I have good news; the older generations are the fastest growing segments for sending and receiving text messages. In fact, adults ages 35-55 send and receive on average 1,143 messages per month.

Text Messaging is Increasing

Text campaigns are an easy way to send specials and deals to your customer base, helping you increase your presence and increase mindshare.

At AdsUpNow, we make SMS campaigns easy and rewarding. Contact us today and we’ll get started on a custom-made texting campaign that is sure to connect you with your customers and bring increased revenue to your business.


Power of Email Marketing

Email Power
Email Power

Here is a story about how a local client used email to ask their customers to vote for them in a local TV station’s “Best of” contest. Now don’t think for one second that email made them the best. What makes them the best is the absolute dedication to looking out for the best interest of their customers and employees for the last 75 years. That being said this client was able to mobilize their customer base to earn the well-publicized distinction of “Best of” title with a rapid use of their email list

This contest ended on October 13, 2008. The television station had given the people of Western Washington the previous month to vote for who they thought was the best in the state. The only problem was that my client and their loyal customers didn’t even know the there was a contest. The morning of October 10th, my client had exactly zero votes. Many competing businesses had links on their websites and were asking their customers to go to the TV station’s website and vote. They had a full month to “get out the vote” we had 3 days.

That is where email comes in. Now it would be nice to tell you that my client had done things perfectly over the years and had collected all of their customers’ email addresses. The truth is they hadn’t, in fact, they had email addresses for less than 20% of the names in their database. The whole truth is that like most businesses, they had struggled over the years to collect email addresses. In fact, at one point they used a company like Ascendance Digital Media to append their list with known email addresses from a national database. That append plus frequent efforts to ask customers for their email address was enough to get the job done.

The morning of October 13, 2008, just 3 days after they had launched their email campaign they had more than twice as many votes of the second place company in their category. They had succeeded in encouraging more than 1 percent of their database to go and sign up at the voting site and leave a testimonial about their experiences with the company.

All of these testimonials have since been picked up by Google on their local business tool and my client has literally 10 to 20 times as many positive comments as their competitors. That’s a story for a different day.
Here are a few key points to take away from this:

  • Get ready now so that you can contact your database on a moment’s notice.
  • Don’t underestimate the length’s a customer will go to share their experience with others. (this cuts both ways)
  • You don’t have to be perfect at collection but you do need to have a plan.

Having an email list and the ability to broadcast your email list on short notice is an absolute business essential today. Email is the preferred mode of communication for an increasing number of people. What’s more is that if they don’t want to hear from you, they simply don’t read the email or they remove themselves from the list. You don’t have to be an expert to get the job done. A basic understanding of the Internet and word processing is enough to get started. If you want a more professional look and some awesome tracking tools you may want to consider having your email campaigns managed by a professional (we do that). You can try it for free with our tool.